As I touched on in the first post on this subject, there are a wide variety of ideas about how absolute pitch works. Why do some people ‘just have it’? If you’re not born with it, how can you develop it? Why do some people hear real differences in a C and a D, and others not?

In this post I want to discuss some of the ideas around how absolute pitch works, and highlight what I thought was particularly promising in the forum post on absolute pitch training I mentioned before.

Conflicting theories

If you look at training courses for absolute (or “perfect”) pitch, you’ll find a lot of conflicting explanations of what makes the ear hear different pitches differently. Anything from the relative strength of the harmonics, to timbral clues (like the start and end of notes), to an inexplicable ‘character’ that you must try to hear through very deep listening.

My educational background is scientific and I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor – so it’s probably no surprise that I tend to subscribe to the more basic explanation, one grounded in fundamental science: Click to read the rest…

Over at Ultimate-Guitar.com, a neuroscience student is inviting people to try an informal experiment with him, to test a method of developing absolute pitch.

It’s an interesting approach. He’s using a recording of a pure tone of middle C (261.6Hz for you Frequency Fundamentals students!) to ‘meditate’ on. Click to read the rest…

Can you identify the frequency of a kick drum? How about a snare drum? A woman’s voice? A man’s? How about an F#2 played on a piano? As an audio professional (audio recording/mixing engineer, music producer, mastering engineer, etc.) you should be able to identify these frequencies.

Why? We’ll get to that shortly. First, there are some obvious questions. What is the definition of frequency? That leads to why exactly do you need recognition skills? That ultimately leads to the overarching theme of this discussion; how do you train your ears to recognize the individual sonic fingerprints of each sound? Or, to be more precise; what exact mechanisms, or exercises do you need to develop and practice?

The practice of ear training is not relegated solely to musicians, but to anyone working in the “audio” field. Specifically, we will focus on music/recording engineers, producers, and so forth.

A lot of the beginning material will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned professionals.

To you; be patient. Use this as a refresher.

To the audio professional just starting on the journey; we will leave nothing to assumption. Your basics will be covered.

Let us begin.
Click to read the rest…